If we’re to believe the official rhetoric formally put
forth by George W. Bush, Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and all, the
US
invaded of
Iraq
because that country has weapons of mass destruction – and because we have
the right to take them away.Forget
about the fact that there was no indication of
Iraq
posing a threat to the
United States
. And forget about the fact that such an invasion violates international law.
And that such a “preemptive strike” threatens to destabilize the entire
world, with the race now on in places like
Korea
to preempt preemptive strikes.Forget
reality and forget common sense.

Let’s just go with what we have.The
US
went to war ostensibly to rid
Iraq
, a nation of 24 million people now often simply referred to in the American
press as “Saddam Hussein,” of weapons of mass destruction.

Britain: No Weapons of Mass Destruction

Despite a host of false reports about weapons of mass
destruction finds – all
prominently reported in shouting headlines, only to be quietly retracted days
later – there have been no weapons
of mass destruction used in Iraqi attacks and no credible discoveries of such
weapons.British Home Secretary
David Blunkett went as far as to admit late last week that there in fact might
not be any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – but he was still looking
forward to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s government nonetheless, weapons
of mass destruction or not.

Back on March 17th, when George W. Bush in
effect declared war on
Iraq
, giving
Iraq
’s government 48 hours to flee their country, he mentioned “disarming”
Iraq
11 times – using the UN mandate for
Iraq
to disarm as his rationale for threatening war, apparently in violation of
international law and the will of the UN.Once
the bombing actually began, however, finding and destroying
Iraq
’s alleged weapons of mass destruction became priorities number two and number
three on Donald Rumsfeld’s list of eight war objectives.Removing Saddam Hussein from power became Bush’s primary objective.

According to a report published by Reuters, by day 10 of
the war, finding and destroying Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had slipped to
fourth and fifth places on a list released by Pentagon spokesperson Victoria
Clarke.Ridding
Iraq
of “terrorists” and “collecting intelligence on terrorist operations”
became priorities number two and number three.Of course the only terrorist group discovered in
Iraq
, Ansar al-Islam, was operating out of the US/British controlled northern
autonomous area – where they could have been routed at any time by US forces
– but that’s another story.

Orwell: We Have Always Been at War With…

For George W. Bush the rhetoric has become even simpler.Gone are his endless references to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction –
weapons that American representatives from two successive waves of UN inspection
teams claim never existed in the first place.In place of this rhetoric, Bush now speaks of “freeing the Iraqi
people.”The transcendence in
dogma, especially over such a short period of time, is frighteningly Orwellian
– with the now discredited supposed rationale for this three week old war all
but forgotten.It no longer matters
why we’re fighting – we’re at war, and hence, we have no time for such
trivial questions.Of course
outside of the fog of American media, no one else seems to be forgetting
anything.

Yes, the rationale for the American invasion was to rid
Iraq
of weapons of mass destruction.And
no, there is no credible evidence that
Iraq
had them.But, and here’s where
it gets real ugly, there are weapons of mass destruction being deployed in this
battlefield – by American troops. Once again there is evidence that US troops
are using radioactive depleted uranium (DU) weapons in
Iraq
– weapons that have been classified by the UN as illegal weapons of mass
destruction.

Radioactive Weapons Found

Former US Army Colonel and ex-director of the Pentagon’s
depleted uranium project, Doug Rokke, in an interview with the Scottish Sunday
Herald, classified the American use of DU weapons as a “war crime.”
Rokke argued that American “double standards are repellent,” since “This
war was about
Iraq
possessing weapons of mass destruction – yet we are using weapons of mass
destruction ourselves.”

The Sunday Herald
quotes a UN report issued in 2002, stating that the use of DU weapons violates
laws and agreements protecting civilian populations in wartime.These include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of
the United Nations, the Genocide Convention, the Convention Against Torture, the
Geneva Conventions of 1948, the Conventional Weapons Convention of 1980 and the
Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 against the use of “poison or poisoned”
weapons.

According to official Pentagon sources, the
US
left 320 metric tons of radioactive DU on the battlefields in
Kuwait
and
Iraq
after the 1991 Gulf War.This
radioactive waste spread through the environment will eventually cause,
according to the British Atomic Energy Authority, approximately 500,000 deaths.DU contamination is also, according to the UN, the most likely cause of
the 1,000% rise in cancer and 400-600% rise in birth defects in
Iraq
since the first Gulf War. Veterans’ rights activists in the
US
also believe DU is linked to the mysterious epidemic of birth defects and
illnesses plaguing more than half of the children of Gulf War veterans born
since the 1991 war.

Because of these horrific statistics, veterans groups,
human rights organizations and peace activists around the world have joined
together to condemn the use of DU weaponry, which is used to pierce the armor of
tanks. Evidence of DU weapons use in the current war comes from a recent
“friendly fire” incident which saw British troops hit by a DU armed shell
fired from an American A-10 “tankbuster” plane.Regarding that incident, British forces in the field told the media that
the American pilot was a cowboy, recklessly shooting his DU weapons
irresponsibly at anything moving below.

War is hell – and this one certainly is no exceptionm
with reports from the battlefield – a host of heavily populated Iraqi cities
– getting uglier.According to the
Pentagon, “precision-guided” bombs have an accuracy rate of around 90%, or
conversely, a failure rate of around 10%.Given
that the
US
has so far launched 8,000 such bombs and missiles against
Iraq
, this translates to approximately 800 weapons veering off target.The resulting civilian carnage has been horrific, with over 1,000 deaths
reported as of Monday (a counter displayed at http://mediastudy.com
displays the current count and links to an incident database explaining each
death).

Thanks for the Cluster Bombs

Civilians are also dying as a result of misdirected cluster
bombs dropped by US and British forces.These
bombs disburse small yellow bomblets which are the same color as the food packs
currently being distributed to Iraqi civilians.British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon dismissed such deaths, declaring
that the mothers of Iraqi children killed by these bombs will “one day”
thank
Britain
for dropping them.

Iraqi civilians are also being killed by artillery and
rockets fired by frightened
US
forces pinned down in firefights.In
one highly reported incident, a
US
fighter, after accidentally killing an Iraqi woman, declared to the media:
“I’m sorry, but the chick got in the way.”Mark Franchetti, an embedded reporter writing for The Times of London, put faces on some of the dead, describing “a
little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold
dress,” who “lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been
her father.Half of his head was
missing.” Nearby, Franchetti reports, “in a battered old
Volga
[automobile], peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman – perhaps the
girl’s mother – was dead, slumped in the back seat.A US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies.”

Franchetti cites one US Marine Lieutenant, in tears,
lamenting the girl’s death.But he
also quotes another Marine at the scene by name, who tells him, “The Iraqis
are sick people and we are the chemotherapy.”That Marine went on to explain, “I am starting to hate this country.Wait till I get a hold of a friggin’ [I suspect this is a sanitized
British translation of “fuckin”] Iraqi.No I won’t get a hold of one.I’ll
just kill him.”

Franchetti, however, puts this apparent barbarism into a
sad context, writing: “Only a few days earlier these had still been the
bright-eyed small town boys with whom I crossed the border at the start of the
operation.”It was the insanity
and horror of ground combat that was the “turning point,” for these Marines.Franchetti described how they “lost all of their assumptions about the
war and became jittery aggressors who talked of waiting to ‘nuke’ the
place.” “Before last week,” he added, “few had even seen a dead body.Now their faces had changed.”

American Victims

This was the point of Franchetti’s article – not to
demonize the Marines blasting away with their machine guns at civilian cars –
but to empathize with their pain and confusion as they’re thrust into chaos.This is the other death – the one that is seldom reported – the death
of the human spirit that goes along with killing.Two weeks ago these Marines were told that they would be greeted as
liberators by surrendering troops.Despite
an endless deluge of Associated Press images supporting this delusion, such as
one that ran last Sunday showing an Iraqi man gifting flowers to an American
soldier at a checkpoint, American forces were met with another reality.They were attacked from all sides, seemingly by everything that moved –
and they shot back.And they kept
shooting.And shooting. And
calling in air strikes.And they are
now drowning in a pool of blood.

They are Americans, 95% of whom hail from poor and working
class backgrounds.They are both
victims of an economic draft, and idealists who wanted to serve their country,
only to find themselves in a military that has been hijacked to fight for a
deranged and unobtainable vision of empire.Like the civilian bodies littering
Iraq
’s roads and cities, these Americans are also victims of war – they will
never be the same.The Bush
administration, while hiding behind its “support our troops” rhetoric, is
cutting their veterans’ benefits at home while sending them deeper and deeper
into harms way in
Iraq
– in a war for what?

World War Four

Perhaps this question is best answered by former CIA
Director James Woolsey, who declared on April 3rd, that the US is
currently fighting World War Four [presumably the cold war was number three] –
which he declared “will last considerably longer than either World War One or
Two…”He named
Iraq
’s neighbors
Syria
and
Iran
as potential future targets, and issued a direct threat to American allies in
Egypt
and
Saudi Arabia
, stating: “We want you nervous.We
want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country
and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you
– the Mubarak's [Egyptian President], the Saudi Royal Family – most fear:
We’re on the side of your own people.”

Of course protests throughout the Arab world demonstrate
that the destabilizing factor in
Egypt
,
Saudi Arabia
,
Djibouti
,
Jordan
,
Yemen
and other countries with close ties to the
US
, is precisely those close ties to the
US
.This is the revolution that
pro-American Arab leaders now fear – not a mythical groundswell of support for
what most of the Islamic world now sees as a “crusade” or religious war
against Islam.

It was George W. Bush’s amateurish use of the word
“crusade” when he launched his open ended “war on terror,” that has
united rival factions in the Arab and Islamic worlds in a Jihad against
America
– whom they see as launching a holy war against Islam. It
was this poor use of language that united many of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi
enemies – people who once welcomed the
US
into
Iraq
in 1991 – against the
US
invasion.Cultures don’t forget
wars of genocide. And that’s what the original Crusades were.

America’s Holy War

And this is how many people in the
Middle East
view what Woolsey calls World War Four.They’ve
taken George W. Bush at his world.It’s
a holy war.A crusade.Of course having fundamentalist groups such as In Touch Ministries
distributing pamphlets like “A
Christian’s Duty in Time of War” to US troops in
Iraq
doesn’t help dispel this image.The
pamphlet urges soldiers to fill out a form pledging to pray every day for George
W. Bush, and “Pray that the president and his advisors will recognize their
divine appointment…”

Evangelical Christian groups are now poised to enter
Iraq
, a country that is 98% Muslim, ostensibly to carry out humanitarian aid.Prominent among them is Reverend Franklin Graham’s organization,
Samaritan’s Purse.Graham, the son
of legendary evangelist Billy Graham, was a participant in George W. Bush’s
inaugural ceremony, offering a prayer for the new president.He also, during a televised NBC interview, dismissed Islam as “a very
evil and wicked religion.”He went
on to declare that “The God of Islam is not the God of the Christian faith.”And now he’s entering
Iraq
on the tail of what will only be perceived as the Crusader’s sword.Don’t expect this war to end anytime soon.

But also don’t give up.It’s imperative for people to speak up now, lest the Bush
administration send
US
forces to kill and be killed across the region.Stopping this supposed war without end is not only a matter of supporting
American values, justice and the rule of law –it’s also a matter of supporting the troops.